Quick! Was this summer’s Dark Knight movie an adaptation or not?

Obviously it was based on characters originally created in comic books, but was the screenplay an adaptation or an original work?

If you’re part of the audience for both Batman comics and the Dark Knight movie, as I am and I imagine an awful lot of those who read Newsarama are, then you probably answered, “No, of course not.”

For those that belong to organizations that honor movies for specific categories—for example, where “adapted screenplay” and “original screenplay” are two different categories—there are likely technical guidelines to consult when determining what falls into which category.

But it’s certainly an interesting question to consider (to me, anyway), so let’s do so, at great, rambling length, below the jump.

I didn’t give the nature of The Dark Knight as an adaptation much thought at all up until awards season started to roll around.

In fact, while watching all the hype building up to the film, watching the film itself and sifting through all the reviews and subsequent political analyses with great interest, I was most struck by how original Christopher Nolan and company’s take on the Batman characters was.

Dark Knight Batman doesn’t really look much like comic book Batman, beyond the fact that he has pointy ears and wears a cape (of course, none of the movie Batmen really do; Adam West’s costume is actually the closest to a comic book version of all the non-animated Batmen to make it to the big screen).

The Joker doesn’t look anything at all like previous Jokers—in the comics, the movies or various TV shows—aside from the color of clothes he wears, and he represented a pretty startling visual departure from comic book Joker.

Elements of the story appeared in various comics like Batman: Year One and The Long Halloween, particularly the Harvey Dent/Two-Face character arc, but that character occurred in scores of different comic book stories (and a cartoon, and another movie), so it’s impossible to point to an issue of a comic or a graphic novel and say, “Ah, this is this version of Two-Face’s origin that’s in Dark Knight.”

And much of the story was cut from whole cloth: The Joker as nihilistic terrorist, the freedom versus security arguments, the extreme moral compromises the various characters make. The plot points might echo elements of some stories from throughout Batman’s 70 years of publishing history, but Dark Knight is far from a one-to-one adaptation in the way that, say, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an adaptation (and expansion, but let’s not get into that) of a single, self-contained work.

There seems to be a big difference between a movie being “based on” a comic book franchise and being an adaptation of a comic book story. A History of Violence, 300, Ghost World, Road To Perdition…despite the occasionally dramatic liberties that were taken in turning them into films, they were all adaptations of a particular work, whereas Dark Knight, like most comic book superhero movies, are based on the characters. And if the plots of particular comic stories are pillaged for material, if the tones or points-of-view of various takes on the characters are used as inspiration, they are often far too numerous to list.

Can you imagine what the credits would have looked like if Dark Knight cited the source that inspired each element?

I think it’s worth noting too that Batman—like Superman, The Hulk, Spider-Man and maybe The Fantastic Four—isn’t even exactly a comic book character any more either. I mean, sure, that’s where he got his start, and perhaps the greatest percentage of the content featuring him exists in comic book form, but he’s also a live-action TV show character, a cartoon character and a movie character, and the same goes for the others.

Was Dark Knight influenced more by the comic books than the previous movies (and it is a sequel) or  Batman: The Animated Series? The Hulk movies, for example, certainly took a great deal of inspiration from the old live-action television show; the last Superman movie was more of an adaptation of previous Superman movies than any particular Superman comics.

How do we process what medium the characters even come from when they’ve colonized all mediums? To us, they’re all comic book characters, but I’m sure to plenty of viewers Batman is primarily a TV show character and movie character, The Hulk, Wonder Woman and “Shazam” are the stars of 1970s TV shows, and Spider-Man was primarily a cartoon character until Tobey Maguire played him.

So as 2008 ended, best of lists started getting published over the holiday season and awards-givers started announcing nominations, I received an email from Mark Pfeiffer the point man for The Central Ohio Film Critics Association, an organization of film critics I belong/ed to as part of my work writing about that other medium I care a lot about (And which I’m actually currently resigning from, since I’ve been focusing exclusively on writing about comics rather than about comics, film and whatever I can convince someone to pay me to write about).

Each year COFCA members nominate films, filmmakers and actors and actresses for various awards, and, when a ballot is assembled, we all vote and, after much complicated math that I don’t quite understand, we pick winners in the categories and issue a press release announcing them. The same as critics groups in big cities all across the country, basically.

Anyway, Pfeiffer wrote that, “As for whether to put The Dark Knight under Adapted or Original Screenplay, I’m following the lead of others and putting it in Adapted.  Those nominating for our group split it among the categories.”

So various members of COFCA were unsure whether it should be considered adapted or original. My curiosity aroused, I asked about it, and he mentioned that the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Association (the latter of which he also belongs to) were designating  Dark Knight as an adapted screenplay.

As David Pepose notes in a post below, Dark Knight also received a Writers Guild of America nomination in the category of best adapted screenplay. This one, however, notes that it’s “based on characters appearing in comic books published by DC Comics.”

Another much lauded, but so far not as nominated, comic book superhero movie received a nomination for a USC Libraries 21st Annual Scripter Award, which is awarded to “both the author and the screenwriter of the year’s best book-to-film adaptation.” Iron Man was nominated, with the authors of the original cited as “Stan Lee and Don Heck,” which is kinda sorta the case, but the film drew on plenty of other Iron Man stories here and there by other creators as well.

In the weeks to come, we’ll be seeing a lot more groups announcing such awards, and it will be interesting to see where Dark Knight (and/or any other comic book superhero movies) pops(/pop) up from group to group.

Looking at its frequent competitors though, it does seem to be quite a different animal than the others: Revolutionary Road, The Reader and Slumdog Millionaire are based on novels, Doubt and Frost/Nixon on plays and Benjamin Button on a short story. Each of them is a single work of a single medium, rather than dozens of elements from dozens of works plucked from decades of other works in various mediums like Dark Knight.

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